Bitcoin Pizza Day: The value of Bitcoin’s stunning price rise

Bitcoin Pizza Day: The value of Bitcoin’s stunning price rise

In the month of May in 2010, one unit of Bitcoin was only worth USD 0.008. Back then a computer programmer from Florida set out to prove that one could buy products and use Bitcoin as a real-world currency. The programmer, Laszlo Hanyecz, proposed the idea of buying 2 pizzas using nothing but Bitcoin for a sum in Bitcoins, in which today would be worth an extravagant amount.

Laszlo Hanyecz goes to an online forum and mentions on the site, “I’ll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.”, he further goes on to mention, “Maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later.” Maybe he was kidding is what everyone on the forum might have thought and a thread of comments had started pouring in. Before leaving the forum he signs off saying, “If you’re interested please let me know and we can work out a deal.”

Most of the members in the forum were curious and decided to be involved in the experiment. While some were interested, there were also those who felt that this as a way to get some free meal by using some cypher encrypted technology that has no real value in the outside world and also was heavily undervalued that the dollar.

Some of the users mocked the computer programmer from Florida. To one of the comments that said, “Good luck on getting your free pizza”, Laszlo Hanyecz replied, “I just think it would be interesting if I could say that I paid for a pizza in bitcoins.” Exactly five days later Laszlo Hanyecz posted a picture on the site that showed him having successfully purchased two large pizzas. He also mentioned the amount that he invested in buying these edible products. 10,000 Bitcoins. Back then it only seemed as a very small amount close to no value. Today that same amount is a whopping USD 80 million.

If the computer programmer had waited a little longer, say a couple of months more, then he would not have made the decision to buy the pizzas with the amount of Bitcoins that he had spent. Because in a span of two months from then, the price of Bitcoin rose to ten-fold the value of what it was in May. Even Laszlo Hanyecz did not know that it was going to be so big later on. And today it is indeed a very big phenomenon. Laszlo Hanyecz mentions that he had accumulated that much amount of Bitcoins by mining – it is a process that uses heavy computational power to solve mathematical problems. When a mathematical problem gets solved, the miner gets earned in the form of a cryptocurrency. In Lazlo’s case, it was – Bitcoins.

Now earlier this year, the same programmer, Mr.Laszlo Hanyecz purchases the same two pizzas as he had done earlier in the year 2013 to test the value of the Bitcoin and also to still see if he could really make purchases using this form of currency. He paid only 0.00649 Bitcoin to buy the same two pizzas. Thus testing the Lightning Network. The same amount of bitcoins on May 22nd, 2013 would only be worth 0.00005 cents. Incredible!